Monday, 3 December 2018

As a food stylist, I first gained a world-wide reputation
for my work on NBC’s Hannibal, so meat has always been my métier. Easy for me -
after all, I’m an avid omnivore. I’ve always ordered off the whole menu and
cooked the same way.

On the set of "Hannibal" sawing off a few choice cuts for our cannibal's kitchen.

But things change

More and more, in film and tv, thirsting Vampire Queens are
scripted to lick blood off a raw steak…cannibals must nibble on raw liver to
please the director…aliens have to hunger for squirmy wormy snacks…and zombies
must eat brains. The writers' room insists.

Actors, however, do not have such appetites. Enter the food
stylist who must create edible replicas of these fantasy/horror victuals. And
they must be tasty for the actor who is likely to do 5 to 8 takes.

The Shape of Water -- the Shape of Things to come

The “hero” green pies in the Shape of Water movie were eaten on screen
by the lead actor who has a vegan non-gluten diet. The movie was shot in Toronto, so I was brought in as food stylist to supply gorgeous food that met her strict dietary requirements.

The selection of pies rotating silently in Dixie Doug's display case in Shape of Water.

I made eight different kinds of pie for the pie shop. The
background actors were not on diets and so the background pies contained
unrestrained quantities of dairy, gelatin, eggs and flour.

My production sketch of pies for Shape of Water (Hero pie bottom right)

Food styling in Hollywood North(Toronto)

Hollywood stars are increasingly adapting diets that are
Vegan. Or Paleo. Or Raw. And it seems now all of Los Angeles is gluten-averse. In
Toronto, considered by many to be Hollywood North, most of the lead actors in
the productions I work on are from LA. So I upped those factors in my food styling.

At first, vegan requests were simple: Raw hamburger for a
vegan, gluten-averse actress who, as Vampire Queen (Hemlock), needed to sneak a red-blooded snack as her neighbor was making meatballs. Easy-peasy. Beets, rice
flour, potatoes all riced together.I
made three vats of it. Trouble is, it looked so much like raw ground meat, the
actor wouldn’t touch it.

I was still busy concocting my usual fare: extravagant fantasy
meals for fairy queens (Shadow Hunters), elite afternoon teas (Handmaids Tale),
fake mouldy food for time-travellers (In the Tall Grass, Fallingwater), when I started getting increasingly urgent calls to concoct food for Star Trek that was really more like food from Planet Vegan.

Space whale, anyone?

An episode of Star Trek called for the actor (vegan,
non-gluten of course) to slice a sample taste off a slab of freshly caught Gormagander
(gigantic space whales of course) and eat it raw, like sashimi. So I made twelve of
these sliceable slabs out of pulverized chestnuts.

More fun stuff for the Star Trek Discovery tv series for a vegan gluten-averse actor to munch on. Pistachio eyes, though, so no nut allergies, please. I made six of them with dozens of spare tentacles:

These chewy creatures had extra tentacles that the actor would pull out and chow down.

Also for Star Trek, also vegan and gluten-free: Food styling late into the night making Space Snacks
for a scene at Orion’s raucous alien market scene.

Made from agar, these roasted creatures would be served on skewers in Orion's night market.

Blood-oozing raw steaks the actor was scripted to pull out of the refrigerator and lick. Delicious.

Vegan BBQ spare ribs for an actor who couldn’t eat pork or
meat of any kind – I developed a delicious gluten/soybean recipe that the actor would be able to enjoy eating.

These were really tasty! Made from gluten-soybean dough formed on plant-based "bones"

Raw organs? Would that be Small, Medium or Large...

For tv series Hemlock, I made kidneys and hearts (human-sized) out of agar-coated brioche for a
vampyr prince to eat. He wasn’t vegetarian, but devouring raw hearts and
kidneys is sort of out of the question.

Cake-y on the inside, jelly on the outside. Like a reversed jelly donut only a lot more gruesome.

Cooking up brains on the set of Disney’s Zombie
High School Musical seemed to be a never-ending job keeping me and two food styling assistants busy cooking and colouring cauliflower for three days. Those teenage zombie street parties require a lot of brain
burgers.

Food styling on Location in Hamilton: Lining up brains and buns to make burgers for a zombie teenagers' street party.

...orBUGS?

And sometimes, if you’re food styling for American Gods, some actor is going to need to projectile-vomitmaggots/grubs or bugs or both.

Then there was seafood I had to food style for the fish-averse actor (in the tv series Shadow
Hunters) whose character was being seduced over an extravagant seafood buffet
dinner: (top) Potatoes carved and painted to look like lobster tail medallions; (middle) Eggplant carved into clams which I tucked into clean clamshells; (lower) Pumpkin gnocchi which I used to replace mussel meat in the shells.

That seafood faking went well but reminds me of a dinner party shoot
(tv series Damion) where I was assured no one would eat the oysters until the director
decided it would be fun for EVERYONE to eat oysters. I had only brought 6 dozen
and so I made fake oysters out of bananas I snagged from the craft table.

Sometimes it’s not about being edible…it’s about being
non-toxic.

These "roots" had to shoot out of an actor's mouth as she was being attacked by a tree (just another day in filmland) The production company didn't want the actor to have anything toxic in her mouth, so instead of making plastic prosthetic roots, they called on me for some food styling trompe-l'oeil. I made them out of taralli dough so it would be like chewing on breadsticks - well, monstrously hideous breadsticks.

Or it’s about being
organic...

These cellphones were being ditched in a lake - but the location was in a protected woodland so the film company wasn't allowed to throw anything into the lake that wasn't organic. It also had to dissolve completely in 24 hours. So I made them out of candy.

Pouring the candy onto a warming pan to make black glass screens. The finished iPhones for Stephen King's 11/22/63.

Regardless of the craziness, it’s always a fun challenge being a food stylist working
with actors in a movie world increasingly horror-filled and meaty with fantasy. And it helps a bit to be a mad scientist.

Vegan Food Styling Secrets to come!

In future posts I’ll share some of my behind-the-scenes vegan food
styling secrets with you: How I made Escargots, Osso Bucco, Oysters and Eggs
for my vegan/vegetarian/gluten-averse Hollywood stars. And more!

Sunday, 25 June 2017

The scene where Shadow meets Easter in Gaiman’s
book is a fun picnic on a blanket in a park. This, however, was to be no picnic; no walk in the park. It was a
pull-all-the-stops FullerStyle Feast-o-rama. I came to the meeting with little
sketches of a pretty buffet dotted with bunny sculptures.

My early sketch for Easter's banquet

This is one of a series of sculptures by Jordan McLaughlin that I wanted to use on the buffet but sadly, we couldn’t get them released from the Burlington Art Gallery in time for the shoot

At the meeting we began by discussing culinary extravagances
one might find on a lavish Easter buffet - such as cucumber-covered whole
salmon, big hams and coloured eggs. But this was all way too normal for Bryan. He
turned to me and casually said: wouldn’t it be fun to have roasted rabbits leaping over
the table as if they were captured in stop-motion?

FUN !!!????

Well if I had a walk-in oven and 2 weeks to order an iron
armature, it might be fun. But the shoot was in four days so fun was not part
of the formula. The idea, however was irresistible.

My sketch for Easter's Banquet - revisioned

Back in my studio, I
steampunked an armature together out of flexible pipes anchored to a huge
gnarled grapevine root on which I balanced roasted rabbits that I had wired
into different positions.

Transporting this contraption out to the countryside
location was probably the greatest challenge of all but luckily for me, my
brother volunteered to help and together, we wrangled the thing into his van.
Cushioned between Styrofoam and ice packs, it made the 2 hour journey out to
the countryside retreat where we were filming.

Setting up my leaping roasted rabbits at the location

Artemis eats!

On the central table, I created a little hunting vignette with
the roasted rabbits leaping over a charcoal grill – as if the Goddess of Hunt
herself had arrested wild hares mid-leap and was enjoying a little cook-out in
an abandoned overgrown vegetable patch in the middle of a forest.

I used corn husks to make roasting masks for the rabbits (their charred faces looked too Chilton-esque to be appetizing) and ears (because rabbits’ ears come off when they are prepared for cooking; they are just skin and fur)

The Seafood Challenge

The markets are full of gargantuan lobsters waiting for
their close-up…whole salmons are a classic chaud-froid buffet presentation…giant
shells and seaweed create a gorgeously dramatic tableau.

But the seafood table
presented the biggest challenge because hot summer days and the shifting sands
of shooting schedules and a country location smells like trouble. A smell that
no amount of aerosol spray, air cleaners, fans or prayers could erase.

Our
scenes kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed again. I was prepared for a
2-day shoot but we were there for 4 days trying to keep everything fresh. We
stuffed the display with towels soaked in Fabreeze, poured lemon juice over
everything, disassembled, froze and reassembled the food displays over and over
each time but the smell returned like zombie breath, much to our dismay.

Somehow we mitigated the situation each time the crew returned to our set and
our scenes were shot MOS - “mit out smell” (actually MOS means "without sound")

Smells like the sea -- until Day 3 when it starts to smell like Death's sneakers

Quiet on Table Three! Those chicks are cute, but...

Thorny Crown Roast of Lamb, Cabouchon Gem Eggs and Antique
birdcages filled out the third tablescape. Everyone agreed with me that it would be so cute to have real chicks in the
cages. Until it was time to shoot the scene – they would not stop peeping. Loud
obnoxious peeping.

The chick wrangler gave up trying to quiet them and the
chicks were asked to leave. Thank goodness we had marshmallow Peeps and they
stayed in the picture. Until they were decimated by hungry wasps. A sad sight
indeed.

Crowns and cages - chickless.

Chocolate Bunnies and Stigmata Cookies

When I was a schoolgirl I loved Easter because of all the
decorated sweets. I remember making panorama eggs
– large pastel-coloured sugar egg with a hole in the side that revealed a scene
made of tiny marzipan bunnies hiding jellybean eggs in green coconut grass.

So,
great: we’ll do the same idea in chocolate. It has been done in magnificently
by Choccywokkydoodah.
But for American Gods, the camera may only flash by – if at all, so not so much
exquisiteness required.

It's not Easter until the chocolate bunny shows up.

My assistant
Melodie assembled a bunny carrying a cross along a path of rose petals (de la
rosa as in “Via Dolorosa) to put inside a huge chocolate egg. She spent hours
covering the egg in a gold ribbon and pearl lattice but alas, our big chocolate
Faberge egg was never seen.

Stigmata Cookies Blue Cross Faberge Cookies

Nothing says
Easter like bloodied shortbread. Everyone at the tone meeting was enjoying the
“Jesus eating jelly beans” gag so much, I felt it was a now-or-never moment for
Stigmata Cookies. So my assistant Gina made up dozens of them as well as some
more elegant Cross Cookies decorated with French lattice pattern used so
beautifully on Faberge eggs.

But enough of Tea and Cookies - there's an orgy over at Bilquis' place!

My sketch for orgy food

Bilquis' Orgy needed fruit and a soma fountain.

After all, one needs sustenance at these physically demanding events. So I suggested fruit platters decorated with Bird of Paradise flowers and peacock feathers for our Queen of Sheba.

I wanted them to be small enough for naked servers to carry around on their heads but Props didn't get the memo and all the trays were (surprise!) about 3 ft in diameter. Once they were dressed with the fruit they were heavy enough to crush a small elephant.

The Soma fountain got changed to a pink chocolate fountain for Easter but after four days of nursing the molten chocolate like a newborn, the chocolate fountain was never used.

Giant brass trays of fruit - thank goodness you can't see all the fruit flies that began to build an empire as I built the displays.

So that's enough of my sad food styling stories. Get thee to the kitchen -- I believe it's time for a treat:

Tasteless, perhaps...but yet so very tasty

Shortbread Stigmata cookies

You’ll need a hand-shaped cookie cutter to make these, and
to make the round depressions for the jam, a bottle cap that is about¾-inch in diameter.

2 cups Butter, softened at room temperature

1 cup sifted Icing Sugar

½ cup Cornstarch

3 ¼ cups all-purpose
Flour

Strawberry Jam

Parchment paper

1 In a small mixing bowl, combine Cornstarch and Flour. Set
aside.

2In a large mixing
bowl, beat butter with an electric beater on medium speed, gradually adding
Icing Sugar until well incorporated and slightly fluffy.Stir in Flour mixture with a spoon just
enough to combine then beat batter on low just until blended. Do not overbeat.

3Cut parchment to
size of baking sheet. Turn half of the batter out onto one sheet of parchment
that has been lightly dusted with icing sugar. Roll out to 1/8-inch thickness
and slide onto baking sheet. Cut out hands using the cutter, make the depressions
by pushing the bottle cap into the middle of each hand and slide the cookie
tray into the fridge for 30 minutes to firm up. Once the dough has firmed,
remove from fridge and take away the excess dough, leaving the hand shapes on
the parchment. Gently slide the hands around to reposition them on the
parchment to give them lots of space to expand. If the dough is too soft to
handle, put it back in the fridge to firm up. Add the trimmings back into the
rest of the dough. Repeat until all dough is used.

4 Spoon a small amount of jam into the depression of each
hand then bake at 325 F until edges begin to brown.

More on 108 – coming next week: Godsplaining and more!

With all this food, there’s little time and space for
Godsplaining. So I’ll do a separate post for that (Easter's pagan beginnings; more about Bilquis' roots; more about Gillian's character Media) in the coming week.

Plus I’ll
tell you what I have learned about what’s to come for the GodSquad in Season 2.

A footnote: PETA is always present when we film with animals and we treat them with the greatest care and respect. PETA always makes sure that my food work is made only from animals that are fully certified as humanely raised for food. For example, in the Market scene of 107, I was required to substantiate to the PETA representative that the oysters were not suffering as they sat on their half-shells on trays of ice during filming. This is the extent to which we go to keep our actions humane. And we wouldn't have it any other way.

Unless otherwise noted, all text and images produced by and copyright of Janice Poon/Feeding Hannibal/AmericanGods Table. Use without permissions strictly prohibited.